Rise of the Escaryuba (2nd Edition)
by A-Lord-Over-Birds
Summary: After Giygas' defeat, all was calm until a new mystery emerged onto the scene. With some unexpected help, heroes past and future band together to save their worlds. Rated T for language. (VERSION 2: Kept the old one up for archiving purposes. If FF tells me to remove one or the other that one's going down and this one's getting its "edition 2" tag removed.)


Chapter One: The Hike

Rewriting Rise of the Escaryuba. It sounded too childish. :P

* * *

It had been a while since Giygas' defeat at their hands. Too long.

Ness, Paula, and Jeff had finally agreed on a jungle hike to restore some of their old friendship, but Jeff had decided not to come at the last second.

"So why isn't Jeff coming again?" Ness asked Paula, peering suspiciously at a tube of sunscreen.

"Something about 'technical issues' with the Sky Runner," replied Paula dryly as she checked over their bags.

"Eh. I think he just doesn't like jungles after what happened in the Deep Darkness," said Ness casually. He prodded the door open with his foot and stuck his head out into the hallway.

They were in a hotel on an island off Summers. The air was almost ludicrously humid; any more moisture and it would be raining.

"What if we get Lyme disease?" said Paula, frowning.

"We're not gonna get Lyme disease," said Ness, waving an airy hand. "Come on. Let's get out of here. Look, the mold is back." A large patch of mold, which they had been fighting desparately for their entire stay, was indeed beginning to creep back up on them. "I'll miss you, mold!" Ness cried jokingly, though they were due for two more days in the hotel. He did not suspect that they would not be staying those two days, that in the jungle they would have an experience that would dramatically change the course of their lives.

* * *

Ten minutes later found them hiking through the jungle, following the trail markers set aside for tourists. As it was only Ness and Paula and there weren't any massive planet-destroying aliens out and about, there was none of the urgent tactical talk of their Giygas-fighting days. Instead, they found normal things to talk about, which made it feel like they had only just met. Strange, really, thought Ness, that we haven't had any real contact with one another...just fighting Giygas...

"Mosquitoes! Ugh!" cried Paula as a group of people led by a smiling tour guide walked by.

"Relax," said Ness, grinning. "They won't kill you...although you might get some botflies."

"Botflies?"

"Well, their larvae...they crawl around under your skin. Botflies lay their eggs on the underside of mosquitoes, so that when the mosquitoes land to drink human blood the warmth of the human causes the eggs to break off and hatch...then the worms go in - "

"Enough! You sound like Jeff!" cried Paula.

They continued walking. Soon, a cloud of mosquitoes swarmed their way. These were not ordinary mosquitoes, either - a large tropical variety that was out at all hours of the day, as opposed to the smaller mosquitoes of Eagleland evenings.

"Aah...these things," said Ness. "Can you do anything about them?" he asked Paula.

"PK Shield!" she commanded, and a shimmering psychic shield flickered into view around them.

"Very anticlimactic," drawled Ness. "Something cooler?"

She sighed, exasperated, and in one fluid motion performed a counter-PSI to remove the shield and unleashed PSI Fire α on the swarm of bugs. They were swiftly burnt to a pile of ashes, which the duo duly trod on. After several minutes Paula stopped and frowned at her hand. "What is it?" asked Ness.

"Tick...eurgh!"

"You're nothing like Giygas-fighting Paula," scolded Ness. "She would have just accepted it..."

Now it was Paula's turn to ask, "Can you do anything about this?"

Ness sighed, gave her a half-smile, then spread his fingers. "PK Paralysis," he murmured. The tick on Paula's hand immediately lost its grip as its body went completely rigid, and it fell out, taking its mouthparts with it. Ness swiftly gave her a heal - "To remove diseases," he explained - and they kept walking. Several minutes later, however, a far more serious problem arose.

"Do you hear something?" Paula asked Ness.

He froze and listened carefully. A faint, rapid thudding noise was barely audible. "Sounds like hooves," he said before dropping to all fours and pressing his ear to the moist earth. As much as he resented the feel of the earth on his ear, this maneuvre enabled him to hear clearly the beating of what could have been a thousand hooves. Ness stood up, brushed the dirt off of his ear, and turned to Paula. "Hooves?" he suggested.

She looked thoughtful. "Horses don't live in jungles..."

"Maybe whatever's making those noises isn't a horse," said Ness darkly. In his mind's eye he had a view of a massive, thousand-legged monster rampaging unchecked through the jungle, then decided that that would be implausible.

"What else has hooves that gallops?" asked Paula.

"Cows," said Ness.

"Cows don't exactly gallop, they stampede..."

"They're ungulates. They have hooves."

"Stop being out of character!"

"Sorry."

"Why are we arguing about this? This is a jungle. There are no cows."

"Good point." Suddenly, Ness seized her around the middle and tugged her into a bush just as a horde - that was the only way to describe the mass charging past them - of brown hooved beasts with curved yellow horns stampeded by. Some of the horns had blood on them.

"What - get off!" shrieked Paula. She pushed him away from her and rolled sideways. The next second, she was gone.

"I can explain - Paula?"

Ness stared around wildly, trying to come up with an explanation for what had just happened, but found none. He glanced back at the stampeding mass to his right, saw the three-legged spiders atop some of the monsters, and waited. Several seconds later the stampede stopped and he thought it safe to call Paula's name.

"I'm down here!" called a female voice from his left. It sounded rather muffled.

"Down where?" muttered Ness to himself, shoving aside ferns in confusion. Then - "Oh!"

The entrance to what appeared to be a small underground room was visible. At the bottom of the vertical tunnel he was looking down lay Paula, looking slightly ruffled but otherwise okay. Taking his pocketknife, Ness proceeded to a nearby tree and cut a vine from it. Then he made a tight loop around the trunk of the tree and tossed the vine down the hole, where it came to rest at the bottom. "Climb that!" Ness instructed.

"Come down here!" came the answer. "I think this would interest you..."

Ness hesitated, then jumped into the hole. Landing lightly on a sandy floor, he glanced up to see Paula illuminated by a bejeweled object that glowed with a faint silver light. Other than the object and the sunlight that was able to enter the chamber, the room was dark.

"What's that?" he asked, indicating the object. She held it out to him and he took it, looking it over carefully.

"Sword hilt," she responded, clearly confused. "I dunno what it's doing down here of all places...the thing in the round part at the bottom is missing, though, and so's the blade..."

"The pommel stone," said Ness. "And the blade...what could this be for?"

Then he noticed a small engraving on one side. He attempted to read it, but was unsuccessful - it consisted of odd runes that he had never seen before. Not that he had much experience with runes, but these were strangely curved and had a lot of dashes and dots around them. The runes he knew - the ones the strange old fortuneteller behind Onett's library used - consisted of connected straight lines.

"I've never seen anything like it," breathed Paula, pressed against him in the darkness as they attempted to make sense of the engraving. In the eerie silence, they could hear themselves breathing as if they had just run a marathon. Then a bird screamed and they heard hoofbeats again. Since they were underground, however, the noise seemed twice as loud. Twice as intimidating.

Ness heard a man yell. Without hesitation - an innocent man was in danger, after all - he slithered up the vine and slung his bat from over his shoulder. He found himself in the midst of a group of brown beasts that had broken from the horde and were now standing around the base of a tree, looking up. The things Ness had taken for three-legged spiders were scaling the tree, in which a man with an impressive array of knives had taken up a defensive position.

Taken by surprise, the brown beasts did not mount any immediate attack as Ness leapt from the foliage. He knocked one unconscious with his bat and was winding up to hit a second when they realised he was there. It was too late for the one in front of him: he had already swung, and there was a sickening crunch as the resilient Casey Bat collided hard with its target.

That was when they charged.

Now it was Ness' turn to be taken by surprise. Fortunately, his time spent fighting Giygas had given him almost inhuman reflexes and strength. Without thinking, he performed a backflip and landed on his hands. From there, he pushed hard off of the ground into the low branches of a tree immediately above him, a position from which he was able to assess the situation. There were eight of them, and one of him, although Paula was still in the bushes and could be launching a counterattack any moment now.

Carefully, he shifted up along the branch. It shook slightly. The brown beasts, their attention diverted, paid no attention as the man with the knives deftly threw four of them into the strange spiderlike creatures still attempting to reach him and slid down the tree. To Ness' surprise, the man did not run away, but instead crept carefully towards the small group of monsters around Ness' tree. There was a flash of silver and one of the monsters fell to the ground, dead with a knife in its throat. The remaining seven noticed him then and attempted to charge. As they were quite large and all charging towards a single point, they all collided and stopped short, dazed, but the man was terrified nonetheless and scampered back up his tree.

Ness, with cold precision, leapt into the air and brought his bat down upon the skull of one of the beasts. It struck so hard that the bat quivered ominously and the skull caved inwards, crushing the beast's tiny brain. His feet struck the back of the dying monster and he leapt back into the air. With all the concentration he could muster, he cried "PK Rockin Omega!"

A crackling ball of tricoloured energy materialised in his open palm as he flipped over in midair, his hand pointed downwards. The ball in his hand violently exploded in a burst of shimmering psychic energy which reformed into a blue, red, and yellow haze through which flashing light slashed, dazzling the monsters. There were two small explosions and then a burst of energy that moved in a wave like a minefield going off, followed by four waves that all met at once and caused a colossal explosion.

The jungle was dead silent. All ten of the monsters, even those that were not directly in the way, lay dead upon the ground. Several, he noticed, were scorched, which he traced back to Paula standing in the vegetation with her fingers outstretched.

"I had no idea you were going to do that," she admitted. "I just managed to climb this vine out of here..."

"It's okay," laughed Ness. "You're good. I handled it, with some help from my friend here." He nodded towards the man who was now sliding back down the tree, and with a jolt, he recognised him. "Frank! Frank Fly!"

"Ness," the man greeted him, with no trace of surprise. Most people knew Ness by sight nowadays and, for a time, had acted stunned if he so much as said hello. But that time had passed, and Frank had never been one to be overly happy about things.

"What - what are you doing here!?" spluttered Ness.

Frank shrugged. "I was just here. Group of tourists. Then they all got charged by those things and I was the only one quick enough to survive. Been up here for two weeks living off coconut milk and some weird red fruit. I figure if the monkeys can eat it, I can too."

"Two weeks?" said Paula in disbelief.

"Two weeks," repeated Frank. "Haven't showered. I haven't found any water - the coconut milk serves for that. I'm not bathing in that stuff though..."

One of the three-legged spiders decided it was a good time to make its appearance just then. It did not, however, aim its jump properly, so that it crashed right into a tree to Ness' left. Without looking, he swung his bat over his shoulder and smashed the creature against the tree. It squealed loudly before oozing some sort of weird goo that was the colour of bread dough. A distinctive smell of rotting bananas diffused through the damp air.

"What the hell?" said Ness, looking at the mush on his bat. "That..." He turned toward the creature and examined it closely. The appendages he had taken for legs looked more like wide flippers, and its body was more vertical than horizontal (a fact he did not pay much attention to; this was Jeff's specialty). A small knob was visible at the top of what he took for the head, as it had a mouth and eyes - squashed, but unmistakably a mouth and eyes. "If I didn't know any better...I'd say this was a rotten banana..."

"We don't know any better," interjected Frank dryly.

"He's right," admitted Paula, studying the creature with an expression of utter revulsion on her face. "Eurgh."

Before any of them could speak further, however, a thunder of hooves announced the return of the brown monsters. Quick as lightning, Frank seized the two of them by the backs of their shirts and tugged them up into a tree. The leader of the horde, however, had already noticed them, and it abruptly changed direction and charged straight at their tree.

The rest blindly followed.

What happened afterward could only be described as a massacre. The combined force of the entire horde straining to get at the tree coupled with the new influx of power from those still charging brought the tree down. Unfortunately for them, Paula managed to hit it with a PK Freeze as it fell, blasting it the other way. What was left of the PSI surged into the crowd, freezing several solid. The tree crushed everything in its path, forming a line between the now-divided horde.

"Go for the right!" Ness shouted, at the same time motioning left behind his back - he wasn't sure if these monsters could understand English, and he wasn't taking any chances. They apparently could - they swivelled their heads to the right in time for Paula to unleash PK Fire Ω on the left side of the group they were now facing. A powerful wave of intense psychokinetic fire pierced through three layers of monster, incinerating the first layer and badly burning the other two. Before they could recover, however, Ness had struck them all with a dazzling PSI Flash, giving himself and Paula time to recover their PSI enough to be certain of a powerful backup as they went in for a swift physical assault.

Ness' bat whirled like a typhoon; Paula's frying pan swished heavily through the air and clanged repeatedly as it made contact with horned skulls. Frank's knives hummed like strange silvery bees as they flew at their targets. The tree the monsters had knocked over - a very large one, at that - created an effective barrier between them and the second group of monsters, leaving them to eradicate this side before facing the others.

Frank had just withdrawn his last knife from the skull of one of the brown beasts when a different kind of enemy attacked.

Leaping down from the trees, nobody saw the bizarre banana-like creature until it had landed on Ness' face. Obviously attempting to bite him with its strange mouthparts, it was quickly plucked from his face and flattened with a heavy blow from a frying pan.

"What the hell?" said Ness again. "Another of these - " He abruptly stopped talking and leapt into the air, his bat raised. The next second he was spinning wildly in midair, whacking aside what appeared to be an ambush of the black banana-like creatures. He landed and immediately leapt back into the air, compensating for his brief lapse by unleashing a lightning-fast PK Flash. "Watch your eyes!" he instructed them as he landed again, surrounded by the dazed creatures.

"You could have told us that before you decided to PK Flash everything!" shouted Paula, facing the other way and crying uncontrollably. Ness, always the pragmatist, did not waste time responding; instead, he was back in the air, where more creatures had decided to make the leap and were now flying towards him. One struck his face and bit his cheek. Luckily, it didn't have a very good grip and was dislodged by one of its fellows. Both landed on the ground and were accidentally trampled by Frank, who was backing slowly away while watching the scene above him.

"PK Fire Alpha!" Paula cried, waving her hands aimlessly through the air. The result was a weak spray of flame that succeeded in scorching everything that was not one of their attackers. Frank swiftly withdrew several knives from his jacket and flung them at several creatures still perched on branches like strange birds; they shrieked as the silver blades went right through them and proceeded to drag them to the ground, where Frank was able to retrieve the knives.

Finally, Ness dropped to the ground for the last time. The creatures were either all dead or - was it truly possible? - losing morale, which would be a strange explanation to say the least. Either way, no more came to attack them. Then came the whirring noise.

"Not more enemies!" complained Ness, turning to face the source of the noise. The next moment, however, he was smiling and waving one hand at the silver, disclike aircraft that had landed in front of him. A boy dressed in a familiar, drab green suit and black tie stepped out, smiling as well.

"Jeff!" said Paula, sounding relieved.

"Nice to see you guys," replied Jeff with a grin that swiftly left his face as he saw the scene around them. "Whoa. What happened here?"

"Long story," said Ness. "We'll explain on the way - can you just get us out of here?"

"Alright..." said Jeff, frowning. "But you gotta tell me, you hear?"

They climbed into the Sky Runner and made their escape from the nightmarish jungle.

* * *

Hell of a first chapter of a rewrite, huh? I even shocked myself.

Alright, I sound like an arrogant jerk now, so I'll stop.

Anyway, yeah. I'm not really feeling too up to any notes at the moment.

Next Chapter: It's Raining...Starmen

You'll notice I'm renaming some chapters too.


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